Garzone Funeral Home

The Garzone Funeral Home, in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, was operated by the brothers Louis and Gerald Garzone, who with James McCafferty also owned a crematorium, the Liberty Crematorium, at 2778 Ruth Street.¹ Between early 2004 and September 2005 they sold the bodies of 244 people entrusted to them for cremation to Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, whose crews removed bone, skin, and tendon for sale to tissue processors. All three pleaded guilty in 2008. In 2026 Philadelphia police investigating the disappearance of seven women began examining the access that the pornographer R.C. Horsch is said to have had to the crematorium.²³

Biomedical Tissue Services

Michael Mastromarino, a New Jersey oral surgeon who had lost his license over drug use, ran Biomedical Tissue Services from Fort Lee and harvested bodies in a secret room of the Daniel George & Son funeral home in Brooklyn, owned by his partner Joseph Nicelli, through the New York Mortuary at 2242 First Avenue in East Harlem, and at funeral homes in Philadelphia.⁴ The head of his cutting crew was a former surgical nurse, Lee Cruceta. Consent forms and death certificates were forged to alter ages and causes of death. The bones of the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who died of cancer at 95 in March 2004, were taken before his cremation and sold for more than 7,000 dollars to Regeneration Technologies of Alachua, Florida, and Tutogen Medical of Paterson, New Jersey, with his age given as 85 and the cause of death as a heart attack; the family's attorney, David Grossberg, told the New York Daily News, "I hope those guys burn in hell for what they did."⁵ His daughter said: "That people in need of healing should have received his body parts, considering his age and the fact that he was ill when he died, is as appalling to the family as it is that his remains were violated."⁶

A processor that noticed discrepancies in the donor records informed the Food and Drug Administration on September 29, 2005. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court later recited that when Mastromarino learned of the inquiry he "advised Appellees to destroy their records days before FDA investigators arrived." The agency stopped the company's operations that October, the company and five processors recalled the tissue, and on February 7, 2006, the agency ordered it closed for "serious and widespread deficiencies." Federal estimates of the number of patients who received the tissue ran to 10,000 or more. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the five processors that received the company's tissue directly were LifeCell, Regeneration Technologies, Tutogen, the Central Texas Regional Blood and Tissue Center, and the Lost Mountain Tissue Bank.⁷ Recipients sued the company, the processors, and other distributors of the tissue, among them Medtronic Sofamor Danek, in consolidated litigation in the federal court in New Jersey. The processors said they had not known how the tissue was obtained.²⁸

The Philadelphia Prosecution

After a grand jury investigation of sixteen months, District Attorney Lynne Abraham announced the arrests of the Garzones and McCafferty on October 4, 2007, and called the scheme "unbelievably craven." The grand jury found that Mastromarino had paid them more than 245,000 dollars, about 1,000 dollars a body. Bodies had been left unrefrigerated for days awaiting the cutters. According to the court record, Mastromarino's crews took arms, legs, bones, ligaments, tendons and skin, "often leaving only a head and a bloody torso behind in a bag for cremation"; he had told the brothers that donors had to be under seventy-five and free of disease, and they supplied the bodies of people over eighty who had died with cancer, HIV and hepatitis. Told by Mastromarino in September 2005 to burn their funeral homes, they instead incinerated their records in the crematory oven days before FDA investigators arrived, and told the investigators that the records had been lost in a flood.⁹ The identities of only 48 of the 244 had been established. The brothers had given up their state licenses the year before and continued to operate. They had also billed the state welfare department for funerals that families had already paid for, claiming the maximum of 750 dollars each time; Gerald received 51,750 dollars and Louis 25,250 dollars. Louis was separately charged with disability fraud, having claimed from March 2006 that depression kept him from working, and received 18,300 dollars.¹³⁹¹⁰

Cruceta pleaded guilty in Philadelphia on January 30, 2008, and was sentenced to six years and eight months, concurrent with his New York term. Mastromarino was sentenced in Brooklyn on June 27, 2008, to 18 to 54 years, and in Philadelphia to 25 to 58 years, concurrent. He died of cancer in July 2013. The Garzones pleaded guilty on September 2, 2008, the day their trial was to begin, to corrupt organizations, conspiracy, 244 counts of theft, abuse of corpse, and welfare fraud, and on October 22 were each sentenced to 8 to 20 years; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court described the joint restitution as "over $300,000," which the Inquirer reported as 307,000 dollars, and each brother's share under his plea agreement was 144,000 dollars, with a further 18,000 dollars for Louis on the disability count. Louis forfeited 1830 East Somerset Street and the crematorium property at 2778 Ruth Street.¹²⁹¹⁰ McCafferty, who had cooperated, received three and a half to ten years. On a post-sentence motion by the Commonwealth, the sentencing judge, who remarked that in 27 years he had never seen a request for costs of prosecution on a guilty plea, ordered Louis to pay 90,101 dollars and Gerald 90,028 dollars, of which 84,796 dollars and 84,723 dollars respectively were for the salaries of the prosecutors and county detectives assigned to the case and 5,305 dollars each for grand jury costs. The Superior Court vacated the salary portions in April 2010, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed on January 19, 2012, Chief Justice Ronald Castille writing that "although the crimes in this case are particularly heinous," the legislature had not authorized it. A third brother, James Garzone of Florida, reactivated his Pennsylvania license and reopened the business as Garzone Funeral Home Inc.²⁹¹⁰

Horsch

At a gallery in Kensington in 2014 Horsch exhibited what appeared to be autopsy photographs of an unidentified woman and video of her body being put into an incinerator, which he said he had filmed at "a Kensington warehouse where the city morgue would send unidentified remains." A law enforcement official and four people who knew him told the Inquirer in 2026 that he had paid an employee of the Garzone crematorium, identified as George Newsome, in drugs and cash for access to photograph and film the dead. Newsome lived a block from the crematorium, was arrested for heroin possession in 2011 and cocaine possession in 2013, and died in 2014. Gerald Garzone said he had never heard of Horsch. He acknowledged knowing a man named George from the neighborhood and declined to say whether he had employed him. The Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office declined to say whether the city had sent unclaimed bodies to the crematorium. Horsch was not named in the 2007 case. The five women whom police believe to be dead disappeared between 2012 and 2023.³